I've been feeling like I don't have much interesting to blog about these days. My daily life is fairly routine with working the farmer's markets, chilling in Seattle, keeping up the house and hanging out with Leigh. I've fallen behind on some things I wanted to do more this summer like reading intense books and improving my French (my excuse is that the language groups are usually held when I have to work).
One thing I've really gotten into this summer is baking. When I was in France I thought I'd want to learn how to bake pastries but that never really happened because my kitchen was ill-equipped for baking and I wasn't about to invest in the tools I needed only to have to leave them behind when I came home. Plus it was so easy to just buy a treat from a local patisserie, so why bother?
Then I came home and started to miss certain things around the same time really amazing (and normally too expensive) food items became readily available to me at the farmer's markets. Farmers market vendors in Seattle (and maybe everywhere) are known for trading their goods amongst themselves. Through this process Leigh and I are able to get all the fresh fruit and vegetables we could possibly eat in addition to fresh baked bread and goodies, cheeses, etc. The only thing we don't often trade for is meats but we will sometimes go for some fresh fish.
Through this trading process I have found myself with berries, whole grain flours, beautiful vegetables and, of course, my grandparents' own organic apricots and peaches. My first pie attempt was a strawberry pie using spelt flour and local organic strawberries. It turned out really well, but I must admit I had made a strawberry pie once before using conventional ingredients, so I had an upper hand.
Then I was running low on spelt, so I blended it with some whole grain wheat flour and made a pie with organic Rainier cherries. This pie was a lot of hard work because I had to pit each cherry by hand, but it was so delicious that Leigh and I ate the whole thing in two days! I hardly used any sugar or corn starch because I wanted to focus on the unique flavor of Rainier cherries, so the filling tumbled out a little bit upon cutting, but it was still delicious and very healthy.
Then, on Sunday, a Hmong flower vendor brought a few bundles of lavender to sell along with his regular bouquets. I traded some apricots for a bundle of lavender with hopes of experimenting with a lavender buttercream frosting I tasted a few weeks ago. The frosting will have to wait a bit, but I decided to go ahead and infuse the lavender into a naturally flavored and colored water to use in baking.
Basically I pulled off the buds, chopped it up a bit and simmered it in water until it had a heavenly scent and gorgeous purple color. Now I have one and a half syrup bottles of lavender water in my fridge.
I also used some of the lavender along with green tea and spearmint to make a large quantity of iced tea. Then I started in on my next pie: Apricot! I used the lavender water in place of regular water when making the crust and allowed a few of the lavender buds to get mixed into the pie crust as well. Then I crushed some Riland apricots into a jam-like spread (no sugar added) and cut up some firmer Rival apricots for a hearty texture and placed them throughout the filling.
After adding about 3 tablespoons of sugar and some cornstarch to hold it all together I came up with this:
It tastes a lot like my family's Pipitone Farm Apricot Yum, but with big chunks of whole apricot throughout and and nice lavender crust. Delicious! It's also very filling and rich, so Leigh and I wont' be eating it as quickly as the cherry pie.
Our final victory of the day was what I am calling Melange aux Betteraves (mixture of beets) with olive loaf ciabatta bread. Basically a farmer who knows my grandpa came up to me with a huge bag of greens, beets, and squash to trade for some fruit. The bag contained kale, chard, another green we couldn't name, yellow squash and two types of beets. We chopped everything up and sauteed it with some garlic and olive oil. Basically we got an entire organic dinner without spending a penny. The end result was amazing and oh so healthy.
No comments:
Post a Comment